RC2, the (hopefully) final release candidate before the scheduled release of KDE 2.0 on October 23, is out, with binary packages available for Mandrake, RedHat (6.2 and 7.0) and SuSE (6.4 and 7.0). The full announcement is below. As the code will be frozen on October 16 for the KDE 2.0 release, here is your last chance to find show-stoppers, or you'll have to live with them for a while <grin>.

KDE Desktop 2.0 Final Release Candidate Available for Linux®

Final Release Candidate of Leading Desktop for Linux®
and Other UNIXes®

October 10, 2000 (The INTERNET). The KDE
Team today announced the release of KDE 2.0 RC2, the second and
(barring any unforeseen problems) final
release candidate for Kopernicus (KDE 2.0), KDE's next-generation, powerful,
modular desktop. The KDE team has previously released five Beta versions --
the first on May 10 of this year -- publicly; the sole prior release
candidate was released internally only.
RC2 is based on Trolltech'stmQt® 2.2.1 and includes the core libraries,
the core desktop environment, the KOffice suite, as well
as the over 100 applications from the other standard base KDE packages:
Administration, Games, Graphics, Multimedia, Network, Personal
Information Management (PIM), Toys and Utilities.
This release marks the last opportunity for developers and users to
report problems prior to the official release of Kopernicus (KDE 2.0)
slated for this October 23.

Some distributors choose to provide binaries of KDE for certain versions
of their distributions. Some of these binary packages for RC2 will
be available for free download underftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/distribution/2.0RC2/
or under the equivalent directory at one of the many KDE ftp servermirrors. Please note that
the KDE team is not responsible for these packages as they
are packaged by third parties, typically, but not always, the distributor
of the relevant distribution.

RC2 requires
qt2.2.1, which is available from the above locations under the name
qt-x11-2.2.1 or some variation thereof adopted by the responsible packager.
Please be advised that RC2 will not work with any
older versions of Qt. Qt is not part of KDE's release testing.

Check the ftp servers periodically for pre-compiled packages for other
distributions. More binary packages will become available over the
coming days.

About KDE

KDE is an independent, collaborative project by hundreds of developers
worldwide to create a sophisticated, customizable and stable desktop environmentemploying a component-based, network-transparent architecture.
Currently development is focused on KDE 2, which will for the first time
offer a free, Open Source, fully-featured office suite and which promises to
make the Linux desktop as easy to use as Windows® and
the Macintosh®
while remaining loyal to open standards and empowering developers and users
with Open Source software. KDE is working proof of how the Open Source
software development model can create first-rate technologies on par with
and superior to even the most complex commercial software.

Comments

but, when I installed Mandrake 7.2beta it had kde 1.93 I updated to 1.99, I'm currently downloading 1.99-17mdk I have a problem where if I start in runlevel 5 it comes up with the gui to enter username and password, I can't log in as root or any other user it says login failed strait away, the same happens if I lock the screen, the only way I can log in is to start in runlevel 3 and then type startx, this doesn't really matter but it's a bit of a pain, is anyone else having this problem or know how to fix it I'd be very appreciative, if I use xdm instead of kdm that works but it looks crapy..

I've updated cracklib to the latest version from mandrake-devel because I thought that might fix it, I'm new to Linux so I don't know of anyway to fix it other than upgrading stuff *L*

also Kpackage sometimes, well most of the time gives me a signal 11 and crash's when I press install, the same thing happens if I right click on an rpm and open it in "konsole" with rpm -ivh, it crash's right after the RPM is installed..

All this problems are solved and fixed.
You have to download an d install the latest
pam*rpm package from Mandrake-cooker to solve
your login-problem.
Kpackage works perfectly now, but you have to download the latest kdeadmin*rpm from Mandrake cooker (I would also suggest kdebase, kdelibs,
kdesupport & qt2-1.1.).
kdesupport-1.99-1mdk
kdelibs-1.99-5mdk
kdelibssound-1.99-5mdk
kdebase-1.99-17mdk
kdesupport-1.99-1mdk
qt2-1.1-1mdk

Does anyone know how to make Klock work? Whenever one of our users locks thier screen they have to restart X to get back in. Already changed kcheckpass to suid root and no luck. Is this just broken hard or is there a fix? I am tired of people knocking at the NOC. Otherwise KDE is getting to be solid. Rsynced out to 51 workstations accross NFS.

I know it's a dumb question, but I can imagine users used to the behavior of xscreensaver or the old klock, which would show the prompt for typing in the password if someone just moved the mouse, and not even thinking about hitting Enter.

Ok, I know this aint no support-service for KDE or anything else, but I've tried on both #Linux and #KDE with no success, so please forgive me:

I formatted and reinstalled KDE2_rc2 on a clean RH70 system (no gnome or KDE), and things are mostly fine now, apart from two things:
1) During startup I get that cute little dragon telling me that KCMInit crashed and caused the signal 11 (SIGSEGV). It happends every time, on every users. Whats kcminit?

2) Koffice: Seems to work nice with their own, native files, but I've tried to open a MS-Excel document (a task not too uncommon for the Koffice-suite, I suspect), and that makes not only KSpread crash bigtime, but it takes the whole X with it, and I have to do a ctrl-alt-backspace.
(Someone interested in that Excel-file mail me and I'll send it to ya (Sorry - no business secrets in it :-D). Remove "spam" to mail me.).

I guess that its no quick answer to #2, but that KCMInit - whats that?

It appears that this ONLY happends when you create a user using kuser! I added a user the good old way with adduser, and that account is working like a dream in KDE2! I even lost a couple of other annoying "features" that were bugging me when I use this account.

For some oddball reason, KDM doesn't load the background or display the icon correctly (unless I select clock). If I go to the login manager, it shows a question mark as the default icon. This has been a problem in every single beta I've tried (back to Beta 1), and on every system I've installed any of them on. Has anyone else suffered from this problem? I thought for sure it would be fixed by now. All the systems were either Slackware 7.0 or 7.1.

I was having a similar problem. I don't think I saw any mention of it in install HOWTO/FAQs, but apparantly KDM, and KWM (and probably other KDE programs) rely on QT's image-rendering capabilities, which are not compiled in by default. make sure you configure QT2.2.1 with -gif and -system-jpeg.

According to KDM's HTML help, the background image isn't supported anymore in KDM2, instead KDM relies on other programs to set the background.

I don't know why and I can't find the script SuSE uses to start kdm, because that script DOES set the background for me. Maybe someone else knows this?

This is a quote from the manual:
---------------------------------------------
KDMDESKTOP

This section is obsolete. In previous versions of KDM it could be used to control a background screen prior to login. The graphical configurator for KDM may still generate this section, but it is ignored by KDM
---------------------------------------------

Hi
I've been trying to install the kbase sources but then I got an error. I hadn't got any problems installing ksupport and klibs.
The error occured in the part kdm. Afterwards I compiled every part of kbase for itself, but now I don't have the startkde script (Can anyone send his to me?).
Has anyone also got these problems?
By the way. The first answer on this message contains the full output of my error.
Thanks, Grovel

kdegraphics: I just installed the appropriate TeX rpm and it worked. Didn't look at why it's needed now.

kdetoys: there's a configure.in.in (which helps none), but there's no configure.in, so using autoconf won't help. I copied configure and some other missing files (including all the Makefile.in files and the admin directory) from a previous release, configured and compiled. That seems to have worked fine.

Well, KDE 2 rocks for the most part. However, I don't like the animation when minimizing/resizing windows and I can't find out how to turn it off. I really think it should be optional. Does anyone have any info on this?
Thanks

Hrmf , there are some many possibilities to install KDE the WRONG WAY!! can anyone do something like HELIXGNOME ????? That would make thing much easier and there will me FAR LESS complaints about bugs that are caused by a false Installation...

I agree that installation should be easier. The existence of RPMs and other binaries help, but:
1. The RPMs assume a certain starting point. The starting point the includes distribution, version, updates of other packages and dependencies (eg. ALSA updates), previous versions of KDE installed or not installed (eg 1.1.2, 1.94)
2. There is very little correct and complete documentation on what the assumed starting point is and what the installation steps are for each set of RPMs.
I have notified both the KDE webmaster and SuSE. See bug 10102 at http://bugs.kde.org//db/10/10102.html

All well-designed pages are rendered correctly. However, whenever I go to a page that has no FONT tags or default font specified within the HTML (for instance, a 404 Error page), the very ugly "console" font is used instead. From that point on, ALL pages, no matter what FONT tags are specified, are rendered with the console font.

I've checked all the settings for Fonts in Control Center and in konqueror, and nowhere is it set to use the console font.

I'm attempting to compile KDE2 from source, and kOffice does not want to compile. My system is a standard red hat 7.0. Is anyone else having this problem? I attached the interesting part of the compile output.

I've used MDK RPM's and compiled the sources for myself under FreeBSD, but whenever I go to a web page that needs http auth (like www.moses.cx/school/304 for example) Konq no longer asks me for my username and password.

OK. Although I have Red Hat 6.0, I always prefer to compile KDE by myself (I'm doing this since KDE 1.1). I compiled all KDE2 and Qt using GCC-2.95.2 optimized for PII+. I must say KDE2 is impressive. Konqueror works excellent (except HTTP-Auth, making Konq fall in a infinite loop trying to get pages :-\ ). I compiled with Netscape Plugins support (I used an old lesstiff-0.89 I had), and Shockwave works perfect.
OK, now the bugs:
1.-Keystone dies horribly when tries to open a VNC connection with Win32 machines. After this, dies with sig11.
2.-KMail personalities doesn't work very well. Although I chose another personality, KMail sends mail with former e-mail address. :-(
3.-kmidi and kpackage didn't compile. I must disable in Makefile. Perhaps this could be my old RH version. I update many packages since installation some years ago (including glibc, kernel, PAM, etc), but I still have packages from RH6 out-of-the-box.
4.-ktoys doesn't come with a Makefile.
5.-In ksysguard if you choose CPU0 load and CPU1 load in graphs, (seems to be) the same processor... :-(
OK, now the good things:
I compiled two versions: for 586 and for 686. The former is in /opt/kde2, and shared it in network, via NFS. Qt2 is in /opt/qt2, shared too in NFS. Voilà, the rest of the machines (mixed Mandrake 7.1/Slackware 7.0 without patches, out-of-the-box) now has KDE2, without problems. The slower machine, a Pentium 120 w/64MB, loads in 15 seconds. Incredible! This machine can run simultaneously StarOffice w/KDE2
(StarOffice launchs in 52 seconds).
Ah, i18n and l10n works excellent. I chose Spanish/Venezuela, and now I have a Spanish KDE...
Nestor Peña
<nestor at linux dot org dot ve>

You can configure a helluvalot of more or less useful settings in KDE2, but heres one I've never seen before: A possibility to disable capslock! Never used it (on purpose, that is), never needed it, never will. And it's so easy to strike by acciDENT ON THIS LAPTOP. :-)